just e-mailed you, john

wait, where did you move to evan?

and, speaking of new towns, i’ve been bummed lately about the whole friend things to. it was triggered b/c my birthday is soon & under normal friend-full circumstances, I’d convince friends to come out on saturday. as it is, i think leaf & i might see a movie or eat food out in the world or something.

hi mark!! you were in my dreams a few nights ago. you had a baby.

hi kelsey—i don’t have a baby!

i know! but you did in my sleep. it was w/ yer ex . . . C. I forget how it all came about (my knowing about it, not the making of the baby).

However it happened, I hope he was very considerate and asked politely before penetration.

are they aiming to have the birds hump their hats? what is that?!

completely unrelated, but the Batman birds reminded me: i saw a great blue heron yesterday, just chilling in the parking lot to my apartment complex. it was huge—at least 4’ tall. quite a beautiful creature.

wow.

hey — what’s with people using their real names on the sandbox? not that i’m complaining: i have more info to add to my spreadsheet now.

I love blue herons. My parents get them by their house. They’re so elegant & yet secretly evil b/c they can be so aggressive . . . before my cat passed away, we were always afraid she’d get stabbed by one.

xpost You didn’t have your brother’s name on the spreadsheet? I guess that makes sense.

I guess I’m mostly thinking of Dr. Morbius, who was going around posting as Bill Weber for a few days.

now i wish i could have seen it in flight

I want to see a blue heron. where must one live for such a thing to happen.

well, mark is on the west coast & my parents live in delaware . . . but they’re usually around water. i think i’ve seen a couple in minnesota since moving up here.

birds amaze me.

seeing that photo reminds me of how much i love bird legs & toes. on the blue heron, for instance, their legs are so so long & once they get up in the air, everything tucks in so tidy against their belly.

I’ve seen a few back home in MI. Sandhill cranes too.

I saw one of these standing in a pasture next to the freeway on Sunday.

screw chicks, dude

that’s an egret, right?

At the college I attended in the UK, there were a couple of peacocks that hung out by one of the academic buildings. It was beautifully unsettling.

?

i was at an art gallery/farm in new zealand & peacocks ran around inside & out. that was kind of beautifully unsettling as well.

One thing I find odd is that the joint in the middle of those bird legs is not the knee but the ankle. I think horses are the same way, actually.

Cats, too! The weirdest thing about birds is that their knees bend “backward” to ours.

I love the dancing kitty! I also love birds. Cuddling in bed is great, but I can’t sleep that way, mostly because I can’t sleep on my side.

This dvd intrigues me.

that’s an egret, right?

Yeah.

want to see a blue heron. where must one live for such a thing to happen.

i saw a few when i was canoeing on the huron river in ann arbor two summers ago.

Bird legs freak me out, actually. Too then, bend the wrong way, looking all reptilian, etc.

then = thin

a friend of mine has a story about when she was little: she was always getting into arguments with her brother about whether birds have knees. at one point the argument turned into a physical fight and she broke his arm.

“Too then” sounds like it could be a synonym for “so five minutes ago.”

“Too then — not enough now!”

Birds actually do have knees, but they are closer to their bodies and often hidden by their plumage.

Ha.

Sarah, the next time I break up with someone, I’m giving her that dvd.

how are things with Emm4?

The birds’ ‘knees’, like cats’ ‘knees’, correlate to our ankles, not our knees.

What about the bees’ knees?

Pretty good, Kelsey. Taking things slow.

two lumps please, you’re the bees knees but so am i

Would $30 buy you anything at a Michael Anthony salon? A mani? A pedi? I need to get my secret santa gift. I know she loves that particular salon, but I don’t know if it’s tacky to give someone a gift card that isn’t big enough to cover ANY of the services...

there are a couple of manicures under $30, Sarah (and a whole bunch of waxing, if she’s into that.) also, $30 sounds really generous to me.

heh

Ok, good. I don’t know if you were here for it, but I was complaining a while ago about our office Secret Santa minimum gift amount being $35. Thankfully, I got someone I like well enough, so I figure I’ll get her a gift card and then some dark chocolate from a chocolate boutique.

YOU SHOULD BE SPENDING AT LEAST $35! MINIMUM! GOD WHAT IS WITH YOU, ARE YOU JUST CHEAP OR SOMETHING?

UM... xpost

minimum $35??? who do you work with, oil tycoons? god, being a grad student is so sad.

who do you work with, oil tycoons?

Worse. Shrill, pushy bitches.

back when I worked at a real job, our secret santa MAX was $20. that is the civilized way to accomodate your lower-paid staff, of which I was one.

Just got the e-mail about the annual office Glögg party two weeks from today. Expect drunken posting.

i don’t know for sure, but i might be able to set you up with a discount on gourmet chocolate, sarah.

secret santa’s are all but against the law here since it would be a federal violation for me to buy a gift for a supervisor. technically i’m not even supposed to pay for his coffee which i’ve done numerous times as a result of football wagering. which is also illegal now that i think about it.

Yup, Kenan.

Oooh! Could you find out for me pretty please, Julia?

i’ll see what i can do, and let you know.

Jambalaya from the cafeteria today... hmmm. I hope this sits well.

Good luck to you. I had canned corn chowder which was pretty much just over-processed, sweetened goop. Never again.

Status: Tasted okay, resting comfortably. Still wary of that hot sauce.

i ate a chik’n patty. spicy, no less!

This African menthol gum is pretty good, though. I have brushed my breath.

Kiss me, I’m mentholated.

Actually, I was wrong yesterday. I don’t have the Morningstar chik patties in my freezer, I have the Boca ones.

I had a hot dog again. Luckily it was the last in the package so I can go back to real food.

i am picking at leftover aloo ghobi. i just can’t convince myself to eat much of it though—the daal was much better (i LOVE daal). star of india is a good place, but i’m not really in the mood for caulifloweriness.

I have a really hard time with cauliflower. It’s one of my least favorite vegetables.

The CTA can seriously kiss my ass.

The CTA can give me a Christmas Blumpkin.

What’d they do now?

Yeah, it’s been slow for me before, but it’s never been this bad. What happened today?

I waited 21 minutes for a fucking northbound train this morning. As I waited, 5 southbound trains (I have “Southbound Pachyderm” in my head now) went by, and 1 “express” northbound.

Also, I renewed my ChicagoCard Plus last Thursday and it worked 1 time and then stopped. I re-renewed it on Saturday and see that I was charged $75, but it still was inactive! I called customer service where I held for 10 minutes. The CSR said “You were supposed to wait 3 days after renewing before using your card. Because you didn’t, your card deactivated. I’ll reactivate it, but don’t use it for three days.” WHAT???? Has anyone else ever heard of this??????

Never. Sounds like bullshit.

I only have the standard Chicago card. Once the machine ate my $20, though, and I had to spend a long and arduous time on the phone getting it back.

And WTF, if they’re on the stick enough to immediately DEACTIVATE your card, why not immediately ACTIVATE it.

The CTA can give me a Christmas Blumpkin.

It’s the least they could do. But you know how that goes. Forty acres and a mule.

My commute has been totally fine lately. I think I’ve realized that getting on the train before 9:15 assures speediness — after that, they assume that people aren’t actually going to work anymore and thus won’t complain as loudly if there’s a delay.

I think the Brown line is eating up Red’s efficiency.

Oh, definitely. Which is weird, because the work is actually going on on the brown line. I guess they figure they can disperse the complaining if they make one branch of the line deal with closed stations and construction and the other branch deal with huge fuck-off delays.

Every. Single. Day. My commute gets worse and worse. Most days I wait forever for a train, and every day the train moves slower than molasses from Fullerton to Grand. If I leave for work 1 hour before I have to be there I am still not assured that I won’t be late. No amount of bitching is enough to express how frustrating this is.

Oh, see, my delays are always before Belmont. Between Fullerton and Grand? WTF are they doing there? They sure as shit haven’t announced anything.

I was on a train that was poking along btw North/Clyborn and Clark/Division and I heard a man scream right outside my window. That was pretty cool

Is there a bus alternative? You guys have all those fancy Inner Drive and XX Express buses over there, right?

No bus alternative that would make things better. I wish I could take the 147 Outer Drive Exp. I love that bus. (Except for the day I took it and it was running 25 min. late and was the single most crowded vehicle I had ever been on. To make things worse, another 147 broke down and we had to pick up all of its riders! People were snapping at snarling at each other.)

You have bad public transit mojo jesse. My commute is great. I leave an hour and 15 minutes before I am supposed to be at work. I walk up to Addison and there is usually a bus coming, which I hop on even though it’s only 3 blocks to the red line. On the red line, I stand at the last car and have gotten a seat nearly every single day. If I can’t get a seat, I usually see another train rounding the Sheridan corner, so I just wait for that one. All in all, it takes about 30 minutes, door to door. Unless there are problems with the train, but even then, I haven’t been more than a couple of minutes late.

I could take the 147 inner drive bus to work, but it is hard to get a seat on it and it takes longer, and is bumpier. Plus there are too many white people.

Sorry, I meant 146 bus.

Plus there are too many white people.

Good thing you don’t take the Brown Line! It is like White Central in there.

I went to the local Aids Service Org to explore some employment/education/volunteering opportunities today. The guy who I spoke with exacerbated the sour mood that the CTA started. He was completely unconfident and wet-noodly. On the phone I thought he might have been a 15 year old with low self-esteem. When he greeted me in person he said, “Good afternoon—uh—good mor—good morning—uh, Jes—Mr. Kehr—uh, Jesse?” He went on to say such things as, “There are a lot—um.... There are a lot of—um.... We have a lot of—there are lots of opportuni—opportunities...um....here. Um...wow, you write fast.”

Later there was a loud noise outside and he yipped and grabbed my arm for safety.

As it turns out he is way experienced in HIV/AIDS and GLBT shit, but he’s just kind of a noodle-boy.

Anyway, the upshot of all this for me is that I should be able to make a little career shiftaroo some(hopefully soon)day.

I love the 147 because it’s sometimes only 15 min from Foster and Sheridan to Downtown.

i used to take the 147 all the time...

Noodle boys are for stomping on on your way to the top, baby. Greed is good.

Dan: oh man, we’re like sisters

me: you’re a fucking dyke

It’s going to be funny when you start ovulating together.

And smooching each other’s hoo hoos.

He neglected to mention that we were both simultaneously typing “as the Germans say” about the word “drinkenurge” that Jesse had just coined.

Also, you weren’t supposed to tell them I’m a lesbian, Jesse.

Regarding spooning: I can sleep that way all night. Even when I’m alone I have to have a body pillow in front of me most of the time. (and I almost never sleep on my back.)

Holy crap, a building blew up in Milwaukee today.

Goddamn!

the opposite of a christmas miracle.

really, that’s awful. and the story of how the supervisors assure them the gas was off and told them to go back to work is especially messed up.

Just goes to show: You think your boss is an idiot? You’re probably right.